It wasn’t that long ago when parents were picking up their children on the last day of school to start the summer. Now these same parents are only weeks away from dropping their children off again to begin a new academic journey.

Do you remember your time as a youngster walking into the first week of class to start a new year? Typically, those days served as a refresher course for all the students to remember what they learned the previous year so they could be better prepared for the days ahead. In the spectrum of Information Technology, the same idea can be applied to IT management’s ABCs: Monitoring, Automation and Reporting.

Before you jump head first into that next great technological fad, don’t make the mistake of forgetting those IT management fundamentals. Lucky for you, ManageEngine offers a variety of software tools to help ensure each basic tenant of IT management is covered. Let’s take a quick look at those ABCs, and how ManageEngine can help.

Monitoring

When it comes to IT management, arguably nothing is more important than monitoring your infrastructure. If you don’t effectively monitor things, you are likely to spend all your time reacting to failures or outages, which will make your executives less than ecstatic.

ManageEngine tackles infrastructure monitoring with tools like IT360, which brings two main areas of IT management, IT Operations and Service Management, into a unified dashboard. This gives you the ability to oversee your entire IT infrastructure from a single console.

Applications Manager offers organizations a server and application performance monitoring tool that can help ensure high availability and performance for business applications. This provides a holistic view of your IT resources, and allows you to monitor the performance of various components of a single application.

Automation

Automating repetitive and mundane tasks help free up crucial man hours that can be dedicated to more important projects. Automation is key to maximizing the efficiency of an IT team.

Products like OpManager, which is a complete end-to-end network monitoring tool, allow you to automate the first level troubleshooting steps and repetitive laborious maintenance tasks through its work flow automation engine.

Similarly, ServiceDesk Plus, the help desk software with integrated asset and project management built on ITIL framework, gives you the opportunity to dispatch your tickets to technicians based on rules. If an incoming request satisfies those rules, ServiceDesk Plus then completes the pre-defined actions.

Reporting

Having powerful and useful reporting capabilities, with actionable insights, allow IT organizations to make better decisions for their business. Creating automated and customizable reporting has moved from being a “nice to-have” to a requirement.

A tool like AdAudit Plus ensures critical resources in the network are audited, monitored and reported with 150+ detailed event specific reports and instant email alerts.

Additionally, NetFlow Analyzer provides businesses with real-time visibility into their network’s bandwidth performance, as well as valuable reporting, which helps make critical decisions easier.

Hopefully this recap of the basics doesn’t invoke horrible memories of 12th grade organic chemistry, but instead, serves as a nice reminder to periodically review how you handle the ABCs of IT management.

Unfortunately for those back-to-school fashion tips, ManageEngine is of no help…